Why Wall Street wasn’t won over by Nvidia’s big conference

When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage for his annual GTC keynote on Monday, the $4-trillion-dollar company’s stock started to drop.

Wall Street investors, it seems, were unmoved by the leather jacket-clad founder’s bullish 2.5-hour speech. Instead, they placed more weight on AI’s uncertain future and fears of a bubble. The nervousness felt by Wall Street couldn’t be more different than the buzzy atmosphere in Silicon Valley, where confidence, not uncertainty abounds.

Huang talked for more than two hours about the company’s latest innovations, from new video game graphics tech and updated networking infrastructure to autonomous vehicle deals and a new chip designed with Groq to accelerate AI inference in the Vera Rubin system. He also threw out some eye-watering numbers about Nvidia’s business and beyond. Huang called the AI agent ecosystem a $35 trillion market and the physical AI and robotics industry a $50 trillion market.

Huang also said he expects to see $1 trillion worth of purchase orders for the company’s Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips — just two of Nvidia’s many products — by the end of 2027.

Shouldn’t that make investors excited? It’s not surprising that they aren’t, Futurum CEO Daniel Neuman told TechCrunch.

A great new uncertainty

“[AI] is so good, so transformational, and moving so fast that we don’t actually understand what it’s going to mean for all the things that are the societal constructs that we’ve come to understand,” Neuman said. “The markets hate uncertainty. The speed of innovation has actually created a great new uncertainty that I think most people never expected.”

Some of that uncertainty comes from misleading information coming out of the market, Neuman said, who added that headlines about low enterprise adoption of AI aren’t painting the full picture — at least, based on conversations he’s having.

“Enterprise AI adoption is going to hit inflection and scale very quickly,” Neuman said. “I actually think it’s happening. When you say it’s not, I think what you’re probably saying is the [return on investment] and the receipts are still a little bit undefined and companies are citing the surveys and the reports that are largely six-month-old data. It just takes months to aggregate data.”

This sentiment holds weight when you look at Nvidia’s numbers from past quarters. While companies may not be touting their AI ROI, they are increasingly purchasing Nvidia’s tech. The company continues to not only beat its lofty goals and quarterly estimates, but soar past them. Nvidia’s revenue was up 73% year-over-year last quarter.

There is no sign that will change any time soon either. For example, just this week Nvidia confirmed Amazon made a plan to purchase 1 million GPUs, alongside other AI infrastructure, by the end of 2027 for Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to reporting from Reuters.

Kevin Cook, a senior equity strategist at Zacks Investment Research, agreed with Neuman and joked to TechCrunch that investors not being happy doesn’t change the fact that the whole stock market is propped up by Nvidia, because its tech runs the rails for many of these businesses.

“The economy is sort of orbiting around Nvidia,” Cook said. “It’s building this necessary infrastructure. All these different companies in hardware and software and physical AI — even Caterpillar is now physical AI — that are building off of these platforms.”

None of this means there isn’t currently an AI bubble or couldn’t be one in the future. But while GTC may not have been a boon for Nvidia’s stock, the broader uncertainty doesn’t seem to be Nvidia’s problem. The company is clearly barreling full steam ahead, bringing seemingly the entire global economy right alongside it.

“Nvidia, as you know, is a platform company,” Huang said in his GTC keynote. “We have technology. We have our platforms. We have a rich ecosystem, and today there are probably 100% of the $100 trillion dollars of industry here.